Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 2.djvu/76

60 "Third—Party politics are not taught in the school, neither directly nor indirectly, and all reports to the contrary are utterly false.

"We have seats and desks for one hundred or more pupils. We have a pair of excellent globes and some twenty-four nice charts for the use of the school in the different departments; we have also several fine maps which we shall soon place in the schoolrooms. Now it is for the citizens of Eugene and the surrounding country to determine whether they will patronize and build up a good permanent school, or whether they will continue to run after something new. 'I speak as unto wise men; judge ye what I say.'" He styles himself "Principal of the Eugene City Graded School."

No one, after reading the above, need be in the dark as to what a "graded school" of that day was. It was simply a mixed school, in which higher studies were taught but which took in everybody. It was, for all its specific excellencies, exactly the kind of school whose presence most seriously cripples the public school, and which, in many of the eastern states was a regular target for the shafts of educational reformers. They argued that the ungraded academy, without entrance requirements, not only thwarted the growth of the public high school, but destroyed the efficiency of the elementary school by withdrawing from it the interest and support of an important class in the community, and also by promoting the tendency to look askance upon it as a "poor school", i. e., poor people's school. The problem was solved in New England by transforming many of the academies into the high school departments of the town systems.